Veronica always struck me as being as sexually adventurous as she was domineering. No wonder Archie wound up marrying her.

***

PS: While I’m on the subject of attempts to make Archie relevant: as astute readers may know, the Riverdale universe recently introduced Kevin, an openly gay character. It’s been years since I’ve cracked an Archie comic, but I’d lay odds that Kevin is vanilla, asexual, and mildly fey — and that his stories will never approach anything as gloriously demented as the last two covers. This would seem to reinforce Foucault’s idea that sexual “liberation” is just a way of enforcing an even more rigid code of behavior.

Jason Grote is a playwright, television writer, and librettist. His best-known play is 1001, a deconstruction of the tales of the Arabian Nights. He wrote for season one of Smash, and is currently a writer for Mad Men.

HiLoBooks has rediscovered 10 lost classics from science fiction's Radium Age (1904–33) era. A gorgeous paperback series — collect them all while you can!

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